The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), a charter member of OPF, agreed to become a pilot site for the Preservation Health Check Pilot. In June 2013 the BnF shipped a copy of its preservation metadata from the BnF SPAR system to OCLC Research in Leiden.

OCLC Research and the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) are conducting a Preservation Health Check pilot to analyze the quality of preservation metadata created and in use by operational repository and deposit systems and evaluate the potential of such metadata for assessing digital preservation risks.

OPF, representing the digital preservation community needs, will contribute pilot sites and datasets, provide feed-back to interim-research findings and organize workshops/hackathons to disseminate and advance the take-up of research findings.

OCLC Research, with expertise in preservation metadata and skills in risk assessment, will design the research methodology, carry out the research activities, provide the technical infrastructure, develop data analysis tools and risk assessment methods and contribute to the dissemination of results.

Other parties will be involved during the pilot, in particular maintainers of preservation metadata schemas (LoC), format registration tools (UK National Archive) and risk assessment tools (DCC, NARA, NESTOR).

Background

An important function of preservation metadata is to understand what exactly is in the repository and to provide information that enables periodic check-ups and screenings for risks to long-term access. Several schemas (PREMIS, MIXED, etc.), best practices, tools and registries (PRONOM, JHOVE, DROID, UDFR, etc.) for preservation metadata have been developed in the past 15 years and are in use by most repositories. Preservation risk assessment toolkits and checklists (DRAMBORA, TRAC, etc.) and standards (Metrics for digital repository audit and certification, CCSDS 2009, etc.) have been devised to help repositories assess the preservation risks they run. However, there is little evidence that such risk assessment has become a part of the preservation management process of repositories, nor is there evidence that assessment results are fed back into the development of standards, best practices and tools.

OPF, which represents major libraries and archives with a long-term access mandate, has identified a shared need for supporting repositories in carrying out their preservation management tasks. One of these tasks is to perform regular preservation risk assessment (health check), a task that could be offered as a service, independently from specific repository systems in use.